Family Newsletter

Dear Families,
It was great to meet with all of you last week for our conferences.  It is always fun to share our writing folders, scapbooks and other things we do in class together.  I hope you feel proud of your child's progress so far.  After all, we have only been in school for 37 days!  Isn't that amazing!?

Reading:
The students continued their reading work in our Book Clubs, or guided reading groups.  You should see some of these books come home in your child's book bag on Fridays for reading at home.  We continued reading our Mercy Watson books in read aloud.  The kids are so excited to try new series and they are really improving their abilities to make connections between the characters and the different authors.  In our reading groups, we also continued our work on specific reading strategies for decoding and understanding specific words or vocabulary.

Writing:
We started our unit on small moment writing.  Ms. Alyssa read the book Knufflebunny to the class and the students worked together to find evidence from the book to explain it as a small moment story.  Then, the students worked together to list ideas for how we can turn "big" stories into "smaller" ones.  Small moment stories are personal narratives, they are about something that has already happened and instead of writing about a trip to Florida or to an amusement park, the students are encouraged to "zoom in" and stretch the story our over several pages.  For example, a "big story" such as a trip to Florida might be the small moment story "When I saw a clown-fish at the aquarium."  

First Grade Math:
If you are a first grade math parent, you should have already received a couple of emails outlining what we are doing in our classroom for math. The students work so well together, sharing the materials and math thinking time.  In addition to the number sense learning activities we have been working on in class, the students started comparing numbers using the language "greater than, less than, or equal to."  We have a few games in our classroom, which allows the students to visually see the numbers in many different ways before comparing them, and they love this game.  Ask your child about it.  Another favorite math activity is ordering.  In ordering, the students take a bag of number cards (consecutive sequence for now, non-consecutive later) and order them.  They read the numbers out loud forward and backwards to a friend.  We also play games such as "guess my number", and ask our friends to identify numbers before and after on our number lines.

Upcoming Events and Reminders:

•  ABS School Picture Re-takes are scheduled for 10/26 between 8-9am
• Our traditional ABS Harvest Soup is on Thursday, 10/27 at lunch time.  Please bring in a mug and spoon for your child on Thursday if he/she wishes to eat this soup as well.  Please note that the Harvest Soup is the hot lunch option on Thursday.  If you child does not eat soup, please pack a lunch for that day.  Thank you.  We will also eat outside, so please make sure your child has warm clothing for the outdoors that day.  Thank you.

Best,
Maria